Year after year, the video marketing trend has been gaining strength, so much so that 93% of marketing professionals were using online video for marketing and communications in 2013, 60% of which was for email marketing. 82% of surveyed marketers stated that video marketing has had a positive impact on their business or organisation (The Web Video Marketing Council).

With these impressive statistics in mind, it was important for us to enhance our already established email marketing platform with a strong video provider. In partnership with Kulu Valley, we’ve developed a real-time video integration between our systems to provide clients with up-to-the-minute campaign data that will offer close analysis of video metrics.

The mechanics of the integration are very simple, but when forged together provide a priceless and powerful tool that will help clients target the contacts who invested time to watch the featured communication. The data gathering begins when the contact receives a targeted email from StoneShot that contains a link to a communication hosted by Kulu Valley. As soon as the user clicks the link, we at StoneShot start to build valuable campaign information.

Once the user has finished watching the communication, Kulu Valley will use the StoneShot Public Web Service to tell us that a campaign-targeted contact has watched the video. The data is then remoulded and ready to use. All this happens in roughly a second!

Below, you’ll find a preview of the fruits of our labour.

Total video stats:

The above graph shows us how many times this communication was viewed by a contact that has been included on any StoneShot campaign, i.e. 40 contacts have viewed this video a total of 63 times.

Detailed campaign video summary:

The information we receive in that single second can be applied in a multitude of ways. For example, most of the contacts in the above campaign use Internet Explorer, so any future email campaigns should take this into account. The client can even see how many times a contact watched the video. Those that watched the video more than once are definitely worth contacting. The graph also shows when the video was watched. As you can see above, there were no views on the 25 and 26 January. This was a weekend, so it may be worth sending future campaigns out earlier in the week.

Drop off:

Knowing when people stopped watching a video will give you insight on if/when the video might need trimming or editing for optimum results during the next campaign.

Salesforce integration:

We didn’t stop development at our database. We also replicated the video integration into our SalesForce solution. In less than an hour, you will not only see the opens and click stats appear, but you will start to build up useful analysis for video views against an eShot.

It’s easy to drop a video into an email, but unless you can measure success rates, you won’t be using video marketing to its full potential. If you’d like to learn more about this exciting new functionality and how you can sync it to your own database, email us at engage@stoneshot.com